Shakespeare’s “Pericles, Prince of Tyre,” is, according to Ben Jonson, “a mouldy tale,” and, until recently, it was seldom staged. In an informal poll of dedicated New York theatre-goers, last week, only one person had seen it. But the play has enjoyed a number of productions in the past two years, and recently a “Pericles” opened in Brooklyn, at the Theatre for a New Audience’s Polonsky Center, under the direction of Sir Trevor Nunn. Nunn, who is best known in the U.S. for the Broadway musicals “Cats,” “Les Misérables,” and “Nicholas Nickleby,” is the former artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, in Stratford-upon-Avon. He has directed thirty-four of Shakespeare’s plays, but this is his first “Pericles.” (The other omissions, “King John” and “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” will go up in London later this year.)
One recent afternoon, Nunn, now seventy-six, sat catching his breath in the Polonsky’s green room. Undone by the vagaries of the N train, he had run from the subway to make a technical rehearsal. Dressed in blue jeans and a zip-front sweater, with his hooded eyes and his slight stoop, he looked like a ruffled owl. Speaking of “Pericles,” he said, “When you first read the play, you think, What? It is hard to believe it is one of the works of Shakespeare. It’s confusing. Did he write it as a satire? Was he poking fun at conventions?” He continued, “The play is a ‘curate’s egg.’ In England, we use the term to describe a curio. It has an extraordinary and optimistic and unexpected trajectory.”
“Pericles” is perhaps the strangest play in Shakespeare’s canon. In some ways, it’s a dream play, a bridge between the tragedies—“Othello,” “Macbeth,” and “King Lear”—and the late romances—“The Winter’s Tale,” “Cymbeline,” and “The Tempest.” Nunn said, “Some people argue that ‘Coriolanus’ is a bit later, but one does not know. Of course, before ‘Pericles,’ there is no joy. Almost nothing to relieve the gloom.” It’s definitely a journey play, and though the story “Pericles” tells is an old one, based on the Greek legend of Apollonius of Tyre, it’s topical: subjects include the Middle East, refugees, perilous sea crossings, and sex trafficking.
Pericles falls in love with a princess, then, by correctly guessing the answer to a riddle, discovers that she’s ensnared in an incestuous relationship with her tyrannical father, the king, who threatens to kill him. (One of the play’s many baffling questions is why the riddle is so easy to solve, given the severity of the king’s secret.) Pericles flees for his life, marries Thaisa, the daughter of King Simonides, and has a daughter, Marina, loses them both, endures multiple calamities, and then is eventually reunited with his family. The original Greek text of the Apollonius tale is lost. The first appearance in English dates to the eleventh century; a second version,_ _De Confessione Amantis was written by the poet John Gower, in 1554. In Shakespeare’s “Pericles,” it is Gower who narrates the play and gives shape to the proceedings. Even the names are confusing: Apollonius of Tyre is not the better known Stoic philosopher Apollonius but the Apollonius of Greek myth. Pericles is not Pericles the statesman, whom Plutarch called “the first citizen of Athens.” Instead, Shakespeare may have lifted the name from Sir Philip Sidney’s poem “Arcadia,” in which the hero is called Pyrrhocles.
The authorship of “Pericles” both is and isn’t in question. Most scholars agree that it’s a collaboration between Shakespeare and the pamphleteer and pub owner George Wilkins, who, the year after the play was first produced, wrote a novelette, thought to be an account of the play, called “The Painful Adventures of Pericles, Prince of of Tyre,” from which some clues to the plot and dialogue are drawn. Wilkins may have written the first two acts, and then Shakespeare wrote the third. (This theory is based on the idea that the first two acts are so bad that Shakespeare couldn’t have written them.) Nunn says, “It would seem that Wilkins was attracted to the idea of Gower’s story, and Shakespeare helped, and together they created something very different. They had a box office, and of course they were going to put his name on it. But what is the official version?”
The play was most likely performed in the winter season of 1609, at the Globe, along with “King Lear,” although evidence gathered by editors of the REED Project, in England, which attempts to establish credible historical records of the performances of early English drama, notes that, contemporaneously, “of the 92 people who testified at various times, only eight claimed to have seen such a play [and] fifty claimed it was never performed.” One boy actor reported playing the part of an angel. However, the play was printed in six known Quarto editions, with the usual illegibilities, between 1609 and 1625, at times cited as “The Late and much admired play, ‘Pericles of Tyre,’ ” attesting to its popularity in Shakespeare’s time. On February 2, 1610, it was performed in Yorkshire, for Candlemas, and, in 1616, a play called “Pericles” was performed at the Queen’s chambers at Whitehall, as an after-dinner entertainment. Sometime between l625 and 1630, it was staged at the Globe. Some of the text that has come down to us is indecipherable. The plays were pirated for sale both by players and by members of the audience who were paid to memorize bits and write them down.
The play was not actually attributed to Shakespeare until the Third Folio, published in 1664. After which, for almost two centuries, “Pericles” virtually disappeared, until a legendary production was staged by the impresario Samuel Phelps, in 1854, at Sadler’s Wells. In the last act, Pericles’ ship set sail across the stage, while a moving painted panorama provided the audience with the feeling that they were all on the way to the Temple of Ephesus, where Thaisa, long presumed dead, was serving the goddess Diana. In the twentieth century, some directors cut the first act, which includes the incest riddle, entirely. In Stratford, in 1958, Tony Richardson set the entire play on a ship. In Edinburgh, in 1983, Toby Robertson placed it in Weimar Germany. In a production directed by a very young Peter Sellars, Pericles, in the third act, sleeps in a cardboard box on a street corner. In a 1994 production, staged by Phyllida Lloyd at the Olivier, the players in different ports on Pericles’ long journey spoke different languages. At the R.S.C. production in 2002, Adrian Noble’s farewell work as a director, there was drumming and belly dancing after the intervals. At the Berkeley Rep, three years ago, in a production directed by Mark Wing-Davey, Pericles could read the first-act incest riddle only when it was reflected by a dress made of mirrors. Nunn’s “Pericles” is set firmly in the ancient world.
The actor Christian Camargo, who has played Hamlet and Coriolanus at Theatre for a New Audience, and whose film work includes ‘The Hurt Locker” and the role of Eleazar in “The Twilight Saga,” is Pericles. Camargo is married to the actress Juliet Rylance, the daughter of the actor Mark Rylance, and there’s a hint of the younger Rylance’s perpetual incredulity in Camargo’s opening scenes. His first-act Pericles is winsome but shocked, his wit stealthily present, like the simple son in a fairy tale. “Pericles starts young and reckless, and his desire leads him into a difficult situation,” Camargo said, before a preview performance. “He’s Hamlet. Then he matures. Lear goes down into a dark hole, but Pericles comes out into the light, as, Leontes and Prospero do in the later plays. My Pericles is a warrior, but that doesn’t mean he’s a thug.” He paused. “To me, the play is a portal. It’s a play about how, when all is lost, one can reëstablish a connection with a benevolent universe. When Trevor asked me to play it, my mind went immediately to the Latin quote on Pericles’ shield: ‘In hope I live.’ ”
The play is full of holes. With “Hamlet” or “Othello,” as Jeffery Horowitz, the artistic director of Theatre for a New Audience points out, if you just do the play—simply speak it aloud, you’re halfway there. Not so with “Pericles.” Jonathan Kalb, the dramaturge for Nunn’s production, explains, “It is essential to see that the play is a mess, textually, from the very first minute we know of it. It’s an object of curiosity. So the surprise is that it works so well in the theatre. Anyone who does this play needs to do script construction before it even starts. Transitional scenes are missing.”
Some of them are filled in by song. While song and mime are indicated throughout, there are very few textual instructions. In Brooklyn, Gower’s speeches have been set to music by the Irish composer Shaun Davey. (This is Davey’s second “Pericles”; he worked with Adrian Noble on the 2002 R.S.C. production.) He explains, “When Simonides says to Pericles, ‘Your singing was wonderful last night,’ is he saying that Pericles has sung? But there’s no indication in the script! So, then, what did he sing and whom did he sing to? We’ve made the song a love song, for Thaisa, who Pericles is wooing, and then that same song becomes a lullaby that Pericles sings to the baby Marina, after Thaisa dies at sea. Fourteen years later, Marina sings the same song to him. He recognizes it, and it brings him back to life. And the audience recognizes it, too. It’s an emotional kick—a thread that moves through the play that we have made.”
But what can the audience make of it? David Bell, who directed the play in 2014 in at the Chicago Shakespeare Theatre became interested, like Nunn, in what happened to Shakespeare between “King Lear” and “Pericles.” He explains, “Pericles is perhaps the best example of profound discovery through metaphor. The first half of life is about acquisition, and then suddenly, you are divested of things, and you are left with a single man in a corner of a boat, going from port to port. But then, like Pericles, you may be able to experience sympathy and empathy.”
Horowitz, long an admirer of Nunn, who invited him to Brooklyn, says, “The play demands a director who understands the role of music and dance, and the role of collaboration, which occurs in Pericles across time. We, the audience, are in our time; Gower is a ghost, he’s a contemporary of Chaucer’s, and he’s_ _telling us an ancient tale. But it’s a play about healing and redemption and reconciliation. One of the great scenes in Shakespeare is the reunion, at the end of the play, between Pericles and his Marina, his lost daughter.” He pauses. “And I think reconciliation resonates with us now, in this country.”
Last summer, Rob Melrose directed a production of “Pericles” for the Public Theatre’s Mobile Unit, which puts on plays for audiences in prisons and homeless shelters throughout the five boroughs. He says, “I thought, It makes so much sense in those communities, where people are often separated from their loved ones. James Shapiro, who was our scholar on the production—he came to every rehearsal—said at one point, ‘I don’t know why we do any other play!’ But half the play is Marina’s journey—we had to cut the play to one hundred minutes, and I didn’t cut one of Marina’s lines.”
Daughters of compromised heroes—Marina, first, in “Pericles,” Imogen in “Cymbeline,” Perdita in a “The Winters’ Tale,” and Miranda in “The Tempest,”—feature in all of Shakespeare’s late romances. What do we know of Shakespeare’s life that would have led him there? Shakespeare had three children—Susanna, born in 1583, and Judith and Hamnet, twins, born in 1585. Hamnet died at age eleven. In 1607, when Shakespeare was presumably collaborating with George Wilkins on “Pericles,” Susanna married, and the next year, gave birth to Shakespeare’s granddaughter Elizabeth Hall. The last plays circle around the redemptive power of the female child. (Some readings of Shakespeare emphasize that King James, who succeeded Queen Elizabeth, in 1603, claimed the thrones of England and Scotland through his mother, Mary Queen of Scots). Mark Wing-Davey, whose own daughter is a film director, and who cast his partner, the English actress Anita Carey as a female Gower in a production of “Pericles” a few years ago, told me, “In our own time, so many of us have fractured families. How lovely it might be to be back in a reunited family! We know it is a fantasy, but we are enmeshed in it!”
Backstage at the Polonsky, Nunn said, “Something happened to Shakespeare. I think Pericles influenced Shakespeare, there were elements in the play that influenced him. We cannot know precisely what it was, but something did. And now, here is ‘Pericles,’ a play that must live in its own time, which is also about someone who is known to us. He’s a man who has attracted bad luck, he’s a noble man, he’s a modest man, he’s in the shadow of his wonderful father.” He paused. “How many people does one know like that? A crisis of bad luck throws him into a depression early on, he bravely sets out again, misfortune strikes, and he goes very_ _far down and becomes a hermit. We know people like this. The play asks, What kind of species are we? Must the canker always eat the rose? The stars continue to exist in our contemporary world. But you can’t do the play as if it’s 1946, or now. The gods are on every page.”
